With the recent decentralization in the telecommunications industry there has been rapid growth in the area of telephone equipment, especially the area of modular telephone connectors. These connectors are usually supplied in an industry standard, factory assembled jack or plug configuration. Commercial connectors, such as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,699,496, include jack or plug connectors which are typically factory assembled to telephone cable for installation on sight on a modular basis.
An obvious outgrowth of these modular connectors has been the use of modular adapters which allow a single modular input to be broken out into plural modular outputs. The natural extension of this technique is to use a splitter which accepts a single, multiconductor telephone cable and splits that cable into plural modular outputs. However, as with telephone connectors above described, these modular splitters and adapters are all factory assembled having inputs and outputs fashioned into the industry standard jack or plug configuration. Thus, for example, there may be one adapter having a plug input and two jack outputs and a second adapter having a jack input and two jack outputs. It can be seen that there can be many permutations and combinations of jacks and plug each of which must be separately factory constructed.
The telephone connection industry has seen the advent of a field installable, modular connection apparatus. In U.S. patent application, Ser. No. 577,109, filed Feb. 6, 1984, entitled "Field Installable Modular Telephone Connector", a method and apparatus is described whereby a modular telephone connector can be assembled to a given length of cable in the field without need for factory pre-assembly. This permits the telephone installer to assemble a connector of a given type and terminate that connector to a given length of cable at the site thereby eliminating the need to carry multiple, modular connectors of different types which are assembled to fixed lengths of cable. This greatly reduces the inventory that a telecommunications installer need have at his disposal at any given site. Likewise, it is desirable to provide a modular splitter and adapter which can be assembled in the field into any selected combination that is necessary, at a particular location without having to carry multiple different splitters and adapters which are factory pre-assembled.